Are you okay with the fact that you are digging a hole for yourself every time you promote something?

Before you start promoting a product, you should have an overall growth perspective on the product. If you simply limit yourself to the growth of indicators and work for KPIs, you may dig a hole for yourself and even cause the product to stop growing one day.

I have shared this view on many occasions - don't invest simply for growth indicators, but invest in the overall growth potential of the product. Because the former will lead to excessive consumption of the product's "vitality", while the latter is truly accumulating energy for the product's healthy self-growth ability.

By the way, if you work purely for KPI, you can ignore this article. The following content is more suitable for friends who treat the product as their own children.

Growth Trap

Products that usually lack an overall growth perspective will fall into the "growth trap" more than once - investing a lot of time in revisions and spending a lot of money only to find that it becomes increasingly difficult to acquire users, costs become increasingly expensive, and there are fewer and fewer regular users.

Now " user growth " is increasingly accepted by more and more teams, and many teams have set up special positions for this purpose, but most teams only stop at the literal understanding. The one-sided pursuit of user growth resulted in excessive consumption of the product's hard-earned vitality, leading to the premature decline of the product. When all the fancy tricks are used up and large marketing investments are stopped, retention rates often drop drastically and large numbers of users are lost . Among these lost users, a large portion were old users who were loyal before the growth actions were taken. This phenomenon is called the "growth trap".

Not long ago, one of my students told me this: She is currently in charge of a well-known vertical social product. When the product was first launched, it attracted a lot of attention, and its unique style attracted a group of loyal users. So the team set growth goals with full confidence and started to take action. The team did the following things:

1. Added new communication topics based on the original content main line;
2. Add the latest interactive dynamics display on the homepage;
3. Invest special funds to start importing online traffic .

The campaign did bring about a significant increase in new users and content growth when it was first launched, but within three months after the promotion period, not only was the overall retention rate lower than before the promotion, but it also generated a large number of complaints from old users. At my suggestion, she led the team to put aside the issue of new users for the time being and conducted targeted interviews with early old users, including old users who had already left the product. Among the many complaints, they found a consistent problem hidden behind them, which can be summed up in one sentence: "This place is no longer what it used to be." So they suspended their subsequent growth plans and started to sit down and work with these old users to return to the original value of the product. Among the key words described by those old users, a common anxiety stands out - "sense of security".

The team suddenly realized that for their product, a safe social atmosphere was the differentiated advantage they had established in the first place, and it was also the basic condition for creating high-frequency activity and stimulating high-quality content. But this has not been carefully considered in the growth plan. Fortunately, I stepped on the brakes in time, otherwise the product barriers I built would be destroyed by my own growth plan. However, the experience of escaping the "growth trap" also allowed the team to gain valuable experience. They began to reorganize the product architecture around the core value of "delivering a sense of security" and began to prepare a new "success plan" with clearer goals. It is said that the effect is very good.

Maybe your product does not belong to the same category as the products in the above cases, such as financial management , education, job hunting , etc. , but before starting promotion and growth actions, you must pay attention to the degree of damage to the core value of the product to avoid falling into the "growth trap." Of course, promotion will lead to the dilution of the original value, but the "growth trap" referred to here is the irreparable loss caused by unclear core values ​​and the absence of corresponding concentration protection measures. After all, not all teams are as lucky as the team in the above case.

The word “interconnection” itself implies the inherent communication attribute of the product, but this communication energy comes from the growth of its own value, and growth means its unique space and path. This is a more comprehensive product management concept than "growth".

In the next article, we will take a closer look at the key factor of product growth - the product's growth space . This is something that every Internet product needs to consider seriously at the beginning of planning, and it is also a problem that is ignored by most teams, resulting in them only thinking about growth after going online.

The sequela of this question is - do you think about growth plans for your product after the launch?